Careful Thinking in Reckless Times: The 318th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 6,000. What number is it actually? 318. I don't think it's 318. Did I make that up? I don't know. Somebody made it up. It's 318. It's 318. All right. Not prime. Very simple. It's going to be that kind of a day. Despite of your... You're wrong. Where did that come from? Man, it's just... It's crazy out there. I'm trying to keep my head above water, which is part of what we are going to be talking about today. How do you keep your head above water when everything is so confusing? One thing to do is do what you're doing right now, which is just to remain on solid ground. Terra firma. I say it every time I get off the ferry or the airplane. Terra firma. So that's really what we're about. Terra firma. How do you get to cognitive terra firma? Fair enough. It's an environment that is basically like intellectual quicksand across the board. Across the board is probably the wrong metaphor for quicksand, but so be it. Yep. So I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, your Dr. Heather Heing. Yeah. That's right. We did a fun Q&A last week, which you can find on locals. And we're not doing one after the show this week, but we will be having one for two hours this Sunday at locals at 11 a.m. Pacific. Join us. Join us on locals now for the watch party. And what else, Brett? Yes. Join us for a big party at our house. No. All right. That's not it. Am I missing something? Am I forgetting something? Maybe it's time to go right into our awesome sponsors. They're in. And while I read the first couple of ads, you can, I don't know, find some dry ground to stand on and... Very good. We will be... Getting umbrella. Yeah. No, it's beginning to pour. All right. Good. That sounds like a good plan. Okay. Okay. Our first sponsor this week is Van Man. Here at Dark Horse, we love Van Man's products and are certain that you will too. 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Literally no one in the audience, including me and I dare say, Jen, has ever heard diaper bomb and thought shoe bomb. Well, I guarantee you there are people in this audience who thought the same thing I did and are now feeling quite a bit of relief that they are not alone and you are not alone. All three of you. You are alone. Yeah. Back to the diaper bomb. No. Where were we? It works on rashes and scrapes, acne and sunburn. Our boys who are young men at college now swear by it too. The ingredient list of van bands, honey and towel bomb is short and entirely edible. It's got 100 percent. Actually, the ingredient list isn't edible. The ingredients... Wow, this is going to be a stupid pedantic show. It's going to be a pedantic man. It's a yes. Yep. I mean, I'm just... I'm pedantic king myself. Yes. There's a lot of fruit on the pedantry. The pedantry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The ingredients in... 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It's widely available online and in stores in both it and the company that makes it are fantastic. It's Clear. That's X L E A R pronounced clear throughout history. Improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life more so than traditional medical advances. For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down. Seems obvious to us now, but it wasn't then. Breathing polluted air and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health. Clean up the air and water. People get healthier. Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose. It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person, but it's rare that we get sick through our hands. 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If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listened to Brett's conversation with Nate Jones, founder of Clear on the Inside Rail in November 2024, or to Brett's conversation with Nate's father, Lawn Jones, osteopath and inventor of Clear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses in May of 2025. We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Clear as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses. That's Clear with an X. X-L-E-A-R. Get Clear online or at your pharmacy, grocery store or natural products retailer, and start taking six seconds each day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health. Awesome. I love this stuff and I feel vastly better getting on an airplane after using it. I just think the likelihood of contracting something drops way down and, you know, one cold a year. You spare yourself one cold a year. That's actually a significant upgrade in the quality of life. It is. All right. 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You should go to their site and you should also in their case be aware that they are they're doing such amazing work Vanmans that there are not only a lot of pretenders to the throne but including a site that's actually sending out a lot of stuff that's like Vanmans with two A's and the man or something and they're actually compelling people to send money and they never make sure that you go into Vanmans V a and V a and M a and S and check out clear and BranchBasics all over the place. God I hate the fraudsters. They're everywhere. They are everywhere which actually is somewhat relevant to our initial topic this morning or if it's afternoon for you or whatever it might be. This discussion is about a topic that sounds dry dull and boring but is anything but if you if you know what we're getting at it is about how to think carefully about confusing events and I will say I am proud to have coined the term Cartesian crisis. It is accelerating before our eyes. AI has dumped gasoline on that fire. It is obvious to anyone paying attention that it is becoming increasingly difficult to know what to believe on virtually any topic. But let's take let's take several steps back. The Cartesian crisis which you named after Descartes after his most famous maxim suggests that it is very difficult it is increasingly difficult it is difficult within a Cartesian crisis to know what is true. Right. It is most basic. Discovering what is true is of course what science is about what the scientific method is formalizing with regard to how it is that you think you know something in the world and then determine whether or not it might actually be true. And so the tools that we're going to be talking about today with which to wade through the Cartesian crisis that yes is accelerating and there is you know there's more things in the way of understanding what is true in the world now than there were two years ago, 20 years ago, 200 years ago. I don't know about 2000 years ago but but at a fundamental level figuring out what you think figuring out the complete space of yeah I was going to say solution space that doesn't quite solution set solution set solution set of what might be true. And then and this is where we're going to go in some detail today. Trying to put some probabilities on each of those things. And here's the thing where we're straying from sort of formal scientific thinking is being real clear with yourself about what you have thought in the past and when new stuff comes in be it formal evidence or insight or someone told you something that you think might be true modifying your thoughts about what you think is true and keeping track of what you have thought. And that is how we become more and more honest with ourselves and better and better at actually determining what is true in the world. Right and if I can revise that slightly or just look at it from a different perspective if you're doing the job right at all what you think is likely to be true changes over time. And something changes substantially over time when a viewpoint that you once held flips on its head understanding what it is that you might have seen ahead of time so that if assuming that we get smarter over time which hopefully we do that the indicators that you missed the first time are available to you when you are facing a similar analysis. So just to take one example from our painful history. We at the beginning of the covid vaccine campaign spotted the vaccines as dangerous from the get go. There was never a minute when we didn't think the vaccines that were being offered were dangerous. We did not immediately spot that the claims about their efficacy were likely fraudulent. From there you and I ended up reinvestigating our understanding of the vaccines that we had authorized our own children to get that we had gotten and realized that there were actual vaccines not the mRNA kind of products. Not the stuff that's called vaccines but is really a mRNA based gene therapy but actual regular old vaccines for which we had been strong champions turned out not to be nearly as safe as we had imagined because and here's the here's the lesson is what did I what did I miss I missed that work that I would have told you I was essentially certain had been done was never done the test against the placebo the test on all cause mortality and and disease in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children was not what the recommendation from doctors was based on not in the slightest and where that evidence did exist it told a different story so what did I miss I was too credulous about claim about the implication that work that seems like it should have been done must have been right I needed to investigate whether the work was actually done which is arduous which is probably why you know it's natural to assume we have an FDA everything that's coming from a doctor presumably with safety tested I have reason to be concerned about the safety test but I never had reason to be concerned that they weren't done because of course they were and then that turns out that assumption isn't right yeah yeah I finally went looking explicitly I guess it's probably two two and a half three years ago at this point and published it on my sub stack and because because by then we were hearing from so many people look into it the the vaccines and the childhood vaccine schedule have not in fact been tested against actual placebo by actual placebo I mean placebo so not only you know for for many many many years we've been running into this you know bait and switch where they use a word that has a meaning and they take it and they change its meaning but they leave the word the same and you think you're talking about a placebo and you're not but I would say also that that our understanding of the you know so-called traditional vaccines again we're not no longer talking about the MRNA you know gene therapy products that were tried out and called vaccines in in response to COVID not only are they not safe as we had been led to believe by virtue of the fact that it seemed like they must have been tested against placebo but their claims of efficacy are also are also I want to say suspect to be sort of nice but suspect is wrong as well because when you actually see the you know the changes in well you know relative to the that that we just read for clear you know changes in air quality and water quality precede the the breakout the release of vaccines for many diseases and it is between those two moments after air and water quality have been improved and before the vaccines are released that the declines in the diseases take a sharp decline yep which you know right there is is a substantial piece of evidence but so you change your mind as you learn new things that is what it is to be human that is what it is to be a functioning individual in a world and it is more and more difficult to do as what we imagine is eyewitness especially on screens is not actually eyewitness we are we are seeing things that are already curated that may be fabricated that may not be coming from humans at all but it is even if we are actually seeing things we have been so confused by the you know the nature of our very existence the complexity and complicated nature of our very existence that it is harder and harder to trust ourselves to do our own analysis and so in part in service of that you have sort of formalized a way of thinking about intuition and logic and the relationship between them yep and i want to pick one more thing from that conversation before we launch into the demonstration of of the method such as it is back when you and i were enthusiasts of the vaccines that came from doctors we were not naive well turned out we were naive relative to what was actually going on but we were not naive about the likelihood that there was a real danger with these things which actually caused us to accept the idea that there were people anti-vaxxers who were actually motivated by an instinct to cheat now in this case it would have been an instinct to cheat on behalf of their children which is understandable but the idea is there's a game theory reason that given a vaccine that has to be given to a wide number of people in order to halt the spread of a disease that an individual who doesn't administer that vaccine gets the advantage of other people having taken a tiny risk without taking that tiny risk themselves so there is a freeloader problem in theory when it comes to the idea of vaccines if you had good vaccines with very low risks that game theory problem would be real it happens that the risks are much greater than represented and the game theory is not what's motivating most of these people who have been wrongly called anti-vaxxers most of them i would say from now having met probably thousands what's you don't think i doubt it but certainly hundreds sure um or been exposed to it's a lot you know go to a chd conference it's a lot of people um but anyway most of them are motivated by having a close encounter with injury either themselves or their children or somebody's children that they know and then they get derided as anti-vaxxers which is ironic because so many of them got there through being too credulous about the safety of these things and then having you know bad luck with respect to what happened well and so this isn't this isn't exactly about where where we're going here but um if if your child began to regress within a week of getting a vaccine and you saw it with your own eyes and your child is no longer accessible to you and may never be again no amount of being called names is going to change your mind right that's just that's not a position that you can be uh talked out of um through social coercion and uh and shaming techniques and so in a way this you know the group of people in particular you know the parents whose children have been vaccine injured of which there are certainly you know many you know tens of thousands perhaps i don't know how many but i'm not claiming to have met most of these people but many um are staunch and un uh unflinching in the face of scorn because they know what they saw and they know what their lives are and they know what they have experienced when the stakes are lower or more nuanced or it's not really clear what you might do like why you're on this side of the issue and sure that's true but wouldn't it be easier for you if you were over here a lot of people take the easier path i'm like you know what yeah i know i know it's true i know a is true but if i stand up i'm going to get shot like i i just it's not worth it so i'm going to be silent or i'm going to actually um be really cowardly and craven and speak a truth speak something that i know not to be true and thus keep my job or keep my social standing or keep my bowling group or you know whatever it is and you know those those are the people whom we have been speaking to a lot since evergreen right where they're like oh my god how did you how did you stand up to the crowd it's like well what else was i going to do right and not only what else was i going to do but once you're on the other side of it once you have to use the phrase that we have been using since then gone through the looking glass or on the other side you're like huh well that was actually kind of easy to survive actually and uh isn't it nice to be able to sleep well at night and to wake up in the morning and say well i am i continue to seek truth and i'm going to be wrong sometimes and i'm going to make some mistakes and i'm going to own them and i'm going to speak about them too and you know hopefully we are just collecting people on a journey interested in discovering truth and beauty in the world and you know that that is what we are trying to do and uh but you know most people with you know with a few exceptions like if you've literally seen your child um you know regress after getting a medical intervention and you're being told it wasn't that you're like i'm sorry it was so then that most people will not continue to stand up for what they understand to be true no the particular detail that causes you you know the curtain gets pulled back at the point that you witnessed this extraordinary thing that nobody warned you was a possibility and then the doctor tells you it didn't happen yeah right so the point oh what did i just learn about doctors you know too late to help my own child yeah right that is an amazing it's the ultimate red pill um so to set us in motion let's just say a big part of the motivation for what we're about to do is that people are very bad at separating the social phenomenon involved in sense making and collectively deciding what is actually taking place from the analytical and i think one strength that we have is we know that those things have no relationship you can literally be the only person on earth who believes something is true everyone can be screaming at you that it's not true and it says nothing one way or the other about whether or not you're right and you know the uh the pointy headed folks will come back at you and say well you're dismissing quite a few experts and the point is yeah but i've also seen what happens to experts and the fact is the economic milieu of experts and the social coercion that they face it doesn't mean that expertise is impossible but it means that actually the places that you would expect it to exist it has often been poisoned by a kind of coercion that you're just not able to see because you're not present so the the coercion that causes doctors to embrace dangerous therapies the coercion that causes you know the congress to immunize vaccine manufacturing companies all of these things are systems of pressure that have nothing to do with analysis that you can't see or easily even infer unless somebody takes you on a tour so question is how when very frequently especially if there's anything at stake you are being pressured into accepting an analytical conclusion for social reasons or out of fear right how do you how do you deal with the analytic part to separate it from the social phenomenon what it occurs to me hearing you talk that one of the reasons i keep on insisting in our private conversations and and here as well on sort of dragging it back to like remember we're talking about science this is what science is is i think in school when people are taught science this is the process that they should be being taught not what the kreb cycle is not what pcr is like you know like whatever whatever the particulars are that's great those are the products of science that's not the science itself everyone has the capacity to and frankly the obligation to themselves and to society but especially to themselves to be able to think scientifically and those of us who actually understood that we were training ourselves in formal scientific analysis are more able to take that analysis out into the world that is social and say well okay if you claim this and this person claims this how would i know how would i make the determination i'm going to use the same tools i'm used to using um and the tools that i'm used to using i honed over in a totally unsocial apolitical space where you know it was poison frogs i'm out of gas car or it was tent making bats in Panama where there's very little at stake and right the bats care the frogs care but they don't care about our answers regardless right our answers make sense or or are important in terms of you know whether or not what we know to be true is true but there is no greater greater stakes and so when we would we take that analytical stuff into the social world it seems to some people like it's uh unemotional this is what scientists have our reputation for being like well everyone should be able to move the emotional valence the social valence out of a space where they're trying to make decisions and say how would i know that is the question how would i know what do i think why do i think it and what would have to be true in order to change my mind yep and if you think about your own history as a viewer you will recognize that there are many topics in which you probably now believe something that you would at one time have thought crazy and so so what that tells you is that you may be told you're crazy right now for things that one day you will take to be self-evident so knowing that that pattern is there arming yourself with um a explicit toolkit for sorting out these uh various things and not being persuaded by a chorus of people telling you you're crazy is important so in light of this i decided to run an experiment this week i have heard a lot about how excellent ai tools are at coding i have a minimal history of coding i took a college course uh in the 90s on c plus i've done a little arduino programming but the idea of being able to tell an ai that you want something and have it produce that something seemed frankly pretty unlikely to work i didn't know what was going to happen so i said about trying to create a replacement for a program you and i once had but not exactly it's a program i've reached for many times and been sad that i didn't have it because it would allow you to draw something that i could for example show here and it would be useful so anyway i used clod ai to produce a tool for graphing various things primary on my list of motivations was a tool for making doing a bayesian analysis um bayesian analysis deriving from bayes theorem is a system of thinking in which you monitor your assumptions and the strength of your conclusion changes as your belief in those assumptions so-called priors is altered so jen you want to show the tool it's this is a work in progress but this is a second version of dark horse draw two and what it is is a tool that allows you to assign probabilities to branches so we can make this test branch and then we can say that the probability of this test branch according to our current understanding is 70 percent and voila you get probability point seven on this branch so um you get the basic idea can we not leave the probability at one point two yes can we change one can now what heather is pointing to is that the sum total of probabilities at any given level of this should equal one if you have a complete solution set and there are reasons you might do this without one but but it can never be over one yeah so what we do is we just say um point three here and voila now they equal one I will just also say for those of you who are watching this that there's also a table function in which the values are checked at a particular level of the hierarchy in order to see if they equal one to alert you that you may have done some logic wrong uh if um if they don't okay so what I wanted to do is illustrate how on some controversial issues this tool can be used to help you understand your own thinking why do I believe this why and in particular I want you to keep your eye out for the following thing there are many circumstances in which something seems unlikely maybe even to you and you will get social pressure to agree that it is not true some part of you should be resisting the urge to close down anything that is possible just because you regard it as highly improbable right so my claim is going to be you will be socially pressured into surrendering uh a belief in a possibility and then later on down the line you will not understand why you were confused and the answer is because back when the evidence suggested something was very unlikely you made the mistake of going from very unlikely to I'll just regard that as impossible because it makes my my job of thinking simpler so can we so for me this doesn't remind me of phylogeny at all because it doesn't make any sense for a dichotopus branch to have different probabilities like you know right either branched or it didn't it's it's a one or zero not each is point five so like I actually I'm just looking here we'll hide the probabilities boom okay but but I think better though than hiding the probabilities because what you're at so and we've talked about this you've actually done there's like two different things that you could be trying to accomplish here and I don't think that making tree diagrams is where it's at yet it just doesn't it doesn't look like phylogenies yet this is better as sort of path analysis and and thinking about and putting putting a visual to the probabilities that you have like this is a this is only a tool and you know it's not the kind of tool that this is a kind of tool that very much speaks to the way your brain works and and you know as as we were discussing this morning my brain says well but I know that if I've got three things all of which have to be true if there's something to be true I just multiply those probabilities but having a having a process show that to you can be useful to to reveal to other people so I just the use of the word species and clade and root here makes this feel like it's pertaining to be a phylogeny but really what it is is a discussion of possibilities in logic space yes and in fact I should say because the tool that I wanted to reach for would have been me borrowing from a cladistic tool that we used to have I decided to make this so that it could work for phylogenies and it the graphics aren't good enough yet to do it but put that aside it was not it was intended to be a multi-use tool so let me show you an example and forgive the fact that this ends up small there the I've learned a lot about what programmers actually go through in order to get a program to actually work and what I want to show you is the path analysis part of this program so what we have here is I think that we are having a very insane discussion in public about the assassination of Charlie Kirk one of the things that is insane about it is that people seem to think if you are discussing the possibility that something larger was at work in the assassination of Charlie Kirk you are saying you don't believe that Tyler Robinson is guilty and that that is ridiculous because there's so much evidence against Tyler Robinson but to me that's a non sequitur this this is the point here right the nested sets nature of logic which branching diagrams can reveal in a different way than if you just nested the sets within parentheses or something can can show you that it could be Tyler Robinson and still not have him be some lone gun nut right which is exactly you know what you have what you have established here but but again what you know you've you've used a tool to visualize a logical understanding that you can't like the logical understanding is the human scientific part of this right that is that is absolutely necessary to making meaning in the world so okay so let's just walk through this and then I'll show you how the path analysis part works which is really where this is helpful so the question is who killed Charlie Kirk nobody doubts that somebody killed Charlie Kirk well I won't say nobody but let's just say assuming someone killed Charlie Kirk which I do this is a complete solution set right here okay either it was one gunman or it was a larger conspiracy okay so it happens that I have set the probability that it was a lone gunman at 15 and you're and again you're not pretending that that number is true you're saying this is this is a visualization of your estimation of what the probabilities are as of now based on what you know now so that in part you can go back and check your own thinking later right and one thing I'm going to add to this program is the ability to record why you set a probability the way you did and in this case I will say I have ignored most of the analysis around the assassination because I don't feel like I'm in a position to evaluate it but what throws me is the ballistics that are claimed versus what we all saw this does not add up to me and therefore suggest to me something else was afoot that said weird stuff happens and these probabilities could change I could invert my position based on new evidence or based on some epiphany that I might have but in any case complete solution set 15 percent it was a lone gunman 85 percent it was some kind of larger conspiracy with no specificity as to what that might be from each of those two branches on the lone gunman branch there's one possibility that the lone gunman was Tyler Robinson I've set that at 98 percent there's a lot of evidence against Tyler Robinson if the lone gunman was somebody else well I don't think the evidence would look like what it does so I've set that at 2 percent and again that adds to that adds to 100 percent and again you're not claiming that that that those numbers are true you are using what you currently expect to be true in a model that you can then check later and is changeable yes this is a map of my understanding which can definitely be wrong but I want to understand what my understanding is now and I want to be able to check what it is six months from now I want to see it evolve and I want to know why it evolved what changed when okay so there's another branch the one I have set at 85 percent which is that there was a larger conspiracy involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk no Charlie Kirk on this again you have two possibilities I would say Tyler Robinson is either a patsy in a scenario where there was a larger conspiracy or he was uninvolved now if it was a larger conspiracy and the patsy itself can look a lot different ways to a lot of different ways knowing patsy and unknowing patsy like right right exactly right so my point would be the whole discussion you can't have a discussion was it Tyler Robinson or do you believe in a larger conspiracy because that leaves off the table an obvious likely scenario which is that a conspiracy would use a patsy to hide its behavior so what this means now is that if we put this in path mode whoops here let's fit to screen okay if you put this in path mode we can highlight the two paths in which Tyler Robinson is part of the crime and we get that is 98 percent of the potential on the map of my own understanding of the events okay so here it is there it is you've got the two paths in which Tyler Robinson is involved in one he's a lone gunman in the other he's a patsy and between the two you have what I think is a 98 percent potential so what this reveals about um you're thinking about the probabilities so your your your assignment of probabilities is based on your understanding the possible cases should be recognizable by everyone here everyone will put different probabilities to each of these uh six moments uh but the was it a lone gunman versus was there a larger conspiracy I believe that everyone should should grant that and maybe someone would say isn't there a third possibility well I don't know what it is but okay say there's possibility three and give it a one percent chance and you know drop larger conspiracy to I can't reread your numbers here to you know 84 or whatever um and uh can we just zoom out so I can see um so uh you know is what are there other possibilities between if it's a lone gunman between Tyler Robinson and someone else no you've defined a complete solution set inherently to fact no right uh and Tyler Robinson is a patsy versus he was uninvolved you know could you freeze that in a way that maybe you want to add a third thing maybe maybe but um but really the possibilities that you've described describe everything possible it's the probabilities that you've assigned to them that people may take issue with that you yourself in the future might disagree with but having this and having the ability to look and say okay what you know what if lone gunman then what what if someone else then what right uh allows you to track your logic and to keep an eye on your own intuitions and how they change as evidence mounts yep and let's just say the discussion is liable to be vastly better if the point is can we all agree that this is the diagram and can we then discuss why your percentage chance that it's a lone gunman is set too low i'd like to make the argument to you Brett that you've set the lone gunman possibility too low and it's because you don't really understand something about a 30 hot six or something like that right that's a discussion i am absolutely ready to have as long as we're doing it on a diagram that has patsy properly categorized as a real possibility not saying it happened it could easily be eliminated but the fact that you're telling me you know his fingerprints were on the gun it's like well wouldn't you want them to be if you wanted a pat can we agree that there are people who would benefit from having a patsy to cover their tracks for an assassination of course so wouldn't is the fact that his prints are on the gun and that he appears to have been on the roof is that evidence that there was no larger conspiracy not if you understand what a patsy is so there's going to be many many words for this for this kind of logical contingency thinking across many many domains i you know i'm thinking in terms of nested sets yep and contingencies uh and presumably economics and game theory and you know rationality space like all of the different traditions are going to have different words for exactly what this is what you've done i think that is that is useful that i haven't really seen before is the the visual path and you know as you say it's it's path analysis but the the visual path in which you can you know by which anyone can look at it and say you're missing a possibility okay let's talk as opposed to that probability is wrong well that's the probability i assigned to it i didn't say it was correct but that's my instinct here why do you think it's wrong those are two really different kinds of objections right and and i think honing in on what is the objection that the person who's yelling at you at the moment about something that they are sure you have wrong is is about is it a um you don't understand something about the gun that was used okay teach me educate me or you're an idiot his fingerprints are on the gun okay you're an idiot because you're not understanding what the the causality of of evidence actually looks like yep um and in fact you can spot because there are two levels in this analysis you can spot that somebody who is certain that it was a lone gunman because they believe it was Tyler Robinson based on the evidence is involved in a non sequitur Tyler Robinson is on both branches of this tree so anyway i just think it's super clarifying to not have some weirdo argument where you're saying things and you assume that the natural consequence of them is obvious to everybody it's like wouldn't it be better if you had that argument in a room with that on the board where you can just simply point to which of these four possibilities you're describing at any moment it would be it would be clarifying which is i think in part why this is not happening that you know there are those of us who are seeking clarity and there are others who are trying to shut it down well no i mean it's it's not happening for a lot of reasons some of it is because some people don't want clarity some systems some people don't want clarity um but this you know this is the the 20 questions exercise that i used to do at the beginning of just about every class and that we did together sometimes that we were first introduced to at the force of Costa Rica is a is this kind of lesson right so what what it is is and it's based on a an exercise of the organization for tropical studies does with its graduate students in courses and for people learning how to be tropical biologists as as we were when we were first introduced to it you take people out someplace in nature where they are not going to be in visual distance even better if they're not in earshot of anyone else with nothing but a notebook and a pencil or pen and really like nothing else if they can manage it and you say look i'm gonna put you down here don't move unless you have to you know if you're swarmed by bees or bear comes along you can escape um and i'll come back in two hours i swear i will i used to say to students i've never lost anyone um and just sit and be and observe and for a while what you're going to observe probably um except for those who are sort of the most buddhist and meditative already uh will be the stuff in their head going like what is this this is stupid why'd she do this to me what is going on i like i don't want to be here i'm hungry what am i doing tonight right like all of that all the internal stuff's like you can write those things that come into your head down if you want either professor your peers when you share this with them later on that's not the stuff i want you to share i don't maybe useful to you the the you know logging of your internal dialogue that's not what we're doing here this is an exercise in learning how to actually observe the outside world and and coming to recognize that you cannot observe without your sensory biases because you observe through your senses and they have biases and those are yours and there is nothing to be done about it but what you come to recognize and i'm jumping ahead here a bit is um at the point that you have reported that you saw a thing and then someone else was over there and they're like oh i saw that thing too and then someone else was over there at a different moment in time and say oh but over there i saw the same thing it was just slightly different but it was the same kind of thing as you start to accumulate very similar eyewitness ear witness whatever accounts of a thing you go ah i think i think we have a pattern and so that's the beginning of pattern recognition which is the beginning of truth making of of of truth seeing and revealing and understanding of the universe so as your brain quiets down and you stop worrying about the fact that you are out of candy and you don't have a date for the night and you know whatever it is uh you start seeing you know bird fly by and you wonder where's it going maybe that's your question or you think i wonder if it has a mate or what does it eat or maybe even something as mundane and actually socially constructed as what is it called what is it called it doesn't know what it's called because what it's called is what we call it that doesn't actually tell you anything about it but once you know what a particular species is called you can use some of the you know massive understanding that humans have already accumulated to learn something else it's not as rich a kind of understanding as watching yourself and coming to know but so you write down you know you aim for 20 questions in those two hours that you have about what you actually are observing in the natural world and two hours later come pick you up say free to go i'll see you this afternoon or tomorrow morning depending on when we're doing the thing and then the class of depending 25 or 50 people comes in with their questions and you break them into groups and say okay every you know in each group of four everyone choose one of their own favorite questions and one question from the person sitting to your right that you like of theirs best and then work up from those eight as many as possible in the next you know hour whatever you know how how would you figure out the answer what are the hypotheses that could that could begin to address the observation that you had that prompted the question what are the predictions that emerge from those hypotheses and then you know if you can get this far what are the experimental tests or the observational tests that you could determine to figure out what is true and then you know in the next part of the exercise we come together and and everyone presents what they've done to the whole class and why do people feel fiercely about some of the hypotheses that they have generated about observations that they had just hours earlier or a day earlier things about which they didn't even know anything 24 hours earlier much less have an opinion about it but suddenly not only do they have an opinion they feel fiercely and they are ready to fight you if you disagree and this in part reveals the social social dynamic that emerges once you have put some effort into belief and it also reveals okay but how would we know I get that you feel really strongly about this but how would we know this is where we use the science and the whole process has been the science but this is how we begin to figure it out and like that sort of teasing a part of like okay what's the logical causal set of things that we would need to know need to do to figure out what is true and oh boy do you see how fiercely you care now about something that actually you didn't even know existed 24 hours ago that's that's what you see on social media every single day yeah and actually I think if the formalized exercise involved something like this as you're debating what is the complete set of possible explanations for the behavior we saw if you had them all here and you could even take a poll of the room in order to figure out what the room's instinct was on these things and then you debate out these things you rule out several hypotheses because you have an evidence that makes them almost certain to be false whatever the point is watching the watching the probability collapse to one of the branches without the tree collapsing to anything smaller than it was that's a very useful exercise this so this is one of the key points that we wanted to get to right that in this particular example you've given you just have two options at each but um well I don't know if you want to use the example that we were using earlier in talking you you had you were talking about the existence of God yep oh that's coming up soon okay um well so the the point is I don't know I don't know how you want to get to it but the point is that you don't ever say ah I am so certain that that's not a possibility even though I can't ever have concrete proof that I'm going to reduce the probability to zero or increase the probability to one and thus eradicate all the other branches that keeping them all alive as distinctly remote possibilities allows you to resurrect them if new evidence comes to light yep and that keeps the logical brain open to possibility and relishing of uncertainty in a way that modern life and specifically life on life online does not seem to like life online wants you to be 100% certain all the time I know this isn't true I know this is true how could you believe anything else you're an idiot and actually the you know the point here is really uncertainty is not just your friend it's absolutely necessary you need to retain uncertainty on almost every topic and that does not mean that you need to be wishy washy that does not mean that you need to think there's a 50 50 chance of everything uncertainty can mean you know I really don't think there's a god personally but that doesn't mean that I have decided that there's absolutely zero chance yep now there is as you will see in the next diagram there's something that I decided not to put on this diagram in part just to make it readable but what is implied here is this diagram assumes the assassination of Charlie Kirk and there is a hidden possibility which you will see in the next case so you know if I were to make this diagram more complete I would add here a branch and it would say I know you're at the wrong place I am oh yeah delete that here I did oh it added because I'm in admiral wow it's it's a new app yeah it's a new app it's a little new app that needs some refining okay so go back to select mode let me say I know nothing now I will point out and you'll see in the next diagram that I know nothing uh comes in a couple of different flavors but what would you do with the probability well I would say oops I guess I'm not sure why what what that has I don't know why that's useful here because I feel like because Charlie Kirk whatever the question is right you can just opt out you could be like I'm not weighing in on this I don't have an opinion oh no no this is about something else the diagram as I presented it assumes that there was an assassination of Charlie Kirk what I'm trying to do is instill a kind of mental discipline the same way when our children were very certain of things that were impossible to be perfectly certain of I would say how sure are you and they would say a hundred percent and I would say try again I want I want to know what your degree of uncertainty is and if you say well there are certain things that are just certain the answer actually even those things aren't this is exactly why Dick Hart struggled to even prove to himself that he existed is nothing is that certain right so I thought you said dick heart dick heart who else dick heart who are we talking about now Gary Hart's uncle um but anyway the point is the idea that there should always be looming in your mind the possibility that you are in a coma and imagining all of this or that some malevolent for your brain in a jar and you think you're a person and you're being fed data to see what you are going to do with it right those things aren't significant possibilities but the idea that you leave them open because that means that you are actually completely open to the discovery that something you didn't have on your map should be is a key part of epistemic humility yeah I don't I think that that putting that on this makes this less useful maybe but my point is when you exclude it know that you're excluding it right there are reasons to exclude it for example it makes the diagram uh harder to read but in any case here is another diagram in which we can use path analysis to understand what's going on now this was motivated just so you know very hard to read oh of course impossible to read and I will zoom in um I do not wish to drag this into social space I don't wish to drag anyone else into it but I was challenged by somebody that I know and like over a claim that somebody I've just met believes that uh the venue in which Charlie Kirk was assassinated uh is suggestive is symbolic and it is suggestive of um a darker meaning so here's the the diagrams that's the venue in which Charlie Kirk was assassinated but the line so there's I see three colors painted onto a photograph yes you see three colors painted onto a satellite image of the can we see the satellite image without the colors painted on no we can't um because that Pentagon is loose at best yeah okay okay so this is the image that is used to describe why the inscribing of the Pentagon uh I mean of the uh what do you call it pentagram pentagram uh is being suggested as something meaningful and I was challenged by somebody as to whether or not the um fact that somebody that I had spoken to I had reposted something he said what he said was not about symbolism or anything it was about his friend Charlie Kirk this was somebody who knew Charlie better than I did by quite a bit apparently and so what I posted was you should take his claims about what Charlie Kirk said and thought and what Eric Kirk said and thought seriously because he apparently vacationed with them and went to dinner with them and so anyway it's evidence but anyway somebody challenged me and said well do you take this seriously and showed the images of the pentagram and blah blah blah now so you're not using names intentionally yeah okay so but a guy wrote something that you found compelling and you directed people to it he also posted something about the symbolism at the venue that um you haven't yet said what you think of it and someone said yeah but that's the same guy who said this thing do you take that seriously right you know if you if you do then you're that kind of crazy and if you don't then how could you possibly be vouching for this other thing that he thinks right is that the basic landscape yes and I mean I showed his tweet so I think there's no reason not to reveal that this is John Mappin who reached out to me after my discussions with Tucker to tell me things I didn't know about Charlie okay so what do I do why can I not say to my friend who challenged me over well do you take this you know the venue was symbolic in a demonic way that was in some way intentional well do you take that seriously and my point is the pressure to say no I don't take that seriously is immense I am not going to say I don't take it seriously because of the analysis that we've been showing you the style of analysis in which you have various possibilities and so I want to show you what I do with a question like that that will cause me not to answer it declaratively but to answer it so not to hit the pressure release valve which most normal people would do and say no of course I don't take that seriously right so instead you create this is the venue what are what are the three possible possibilities about the venue right what are the three possibilities about the venue and I see I have failed to input a value which I will try wow okay so I'm in select mode I should be able to select that and add the value but I can't for some reason so this is just dead air while people are only listening so all right so then we're just going to forgive me for my failure of tech here this is a new program as I said I point out okay yeah I mean literally just created it okay so in the space of possibilities where we are asking the question as to whether or not the Utah Valley University venue is significant the shape of it is significant in the assassination of Charlie Kirk as John Mappin asserts I would argue that we are in a possibility space on the bottom branch here I have the possibility that I can't interpret the universe I live in at all I know nothing and the possibilities for why I might know nothing come in two flavors my world is somehow false or I'm crazy now do I think those things have any significant possibility of being true not really I've set the probability at one in a hundred thousand okay so it's low and I thought about setting it at a million but okay so one in a hundred thousand is not worth worrying about here so the point is what's happening in this space is on this other part of the tree and in fact I should be able to just delete this branch so we can not focus on it stuff doesn't work as it should but okay so the other two branches of the tree divide between a branch in which there is a supernatural creator and another branch in which the universe is strictly natural but your p-value is way too low yeah that while I was trying to fix that just a second ago that's exactly the problem so okay yeah so anyway I would say that the chances that the universe is strictly natural are 99 percent the chances that there is a supernatural creator are one percent and we can argue about whether or not I've set those things correctly but you get the balance of it almost all of the action as far as I'm concerned is on the strictly natural universe branch and obviously other people would reverse those those probabilities yes many other people would reverse those probabilities okay but what do you have downstream of strictly natural universe in terms of if strictly natural universe if this is interpret the so-called evidence about the venue being evidence of demonic ritual or something if this is a strictly natural universe then the question of whether or not the structure of the venue is meaningful and symbolic depends on whether the criminals who were involved in criminals you're just using mafias as a generic whatever you know whatever conspiracy might have been involved right remember when in one of the godfather movies a bulletproof vest is delivered with a fish in it and somebody says what does this mean and somebody responds it means luke brotze sleeps with the fishes right the point is symbolism okay so in a world where criminals use symbolism the possibility that the venue is symbolic in an important way exists but I would regard it as very low probability why because what would have had to be true in order for the venue's shape to be important in the assassination of charlie kirk either it would have had to be built with that in mind knowing that either this assassination was going to happen there or that some other thing was going to happen there so it would have had to be the planning involved just doesn't make any sense to me so I think even a two percent chance that if this was just a criminal enterprise that the venue means anything is incredibly I think that's generous yeah it is generous it is generous and I should probably bump it down to less than one percent if we live in a purely natural universe it's also possible that criminal organizations of the sort that might have been involved in this don't care about symbolism in which case the chances that the venue means nothing are extremely high and the chances that it means something are extremely low if on the other hand there is a supernatural creator who has essentially unlimited powers and insight in the construction of things well then the chances that god employs symbolism are extremely high in my book I mean it's one of the languages of god in virtually any tradition sure and so the chances then assuming a supernatural creator which I have set at one percent but again many people would would reverse that would reverse that yeah but if there is a god the chances that god issues symbolism are very low I have it at five percent it's probably way too high and the god uses symbolism I have at 95 percent which is probably too low but the point is then the chances that the venue means something go up I have them at 95 percent and I have the chances that the venue means nothing at or at nothing at five percent okay but I feel like I mean I think this is I think this is useful in terms of tracking what's contingent on what but there's a critical piece missing in this analysis which is that that evidence of symbol was to my you know first time seeing at eyes extraordinarily weak it didn't really look like a pentagon it looked like it's been drawn onto something and kind of like fit into place and so you know I I like the analysis in so far as if entirely natural universe this is very unlikely to mean anything at all if if a god created universe with a god who uses symbolism then the chances get higher but there still has to be some evidence that there's symbol and you know that that you've sort of assumed here you've assumed that the sort of painting onto a picture in a what looks to me sort of like a half-assed way is meaningful and so I feel like that's missing yep that's missing and I wouldn't I wouldn't know how to begin to put a probability on oh that pentagram definitely looks like that venue right because to me it was like I just doesn't but I don't know I don't well in in fact I think you can say even more strongly that the existence of the pentagon implies that you could inscribe a pentagram and right but that but as I said when I first looked at the pentagon itself looks it's just not there like it it looks like that picture which you can't see without like if you can't see the picture without the paint it's impossible to know what it would look like without but it does it looks like it just doesn't look like pentagon so the right thing to do then would be but yes if pentagon then pentagram but that's that's that's not a coincidence that's just de facto geometry right so the thing to do that we have now done in real time exactly the thing that the diagrams are supposed to prompt which is you have compelled me that I have overrated the chances of this being a symbol even if my other probabilities were defensible and that would change the whole architecture and that in fact that that is that is where I think this is useful so you know you and I had some arguments about this right or I'm or I'm going like yeah okay it's a tool the tool could be useful for some people I think it won't you know I don't think this kind of thing would be useful for people whose brains work a particular way even if they are highly analytical I think I am perhaps one of those people but people will always mistake the tool for the work and so you hand people a tool and they assume well now I can do the work and you know you can do the work yeah right so you've created a tool to help you do the work to help you keep track of your own logical and intuitive understandings of system so that you can go back and check on what you have thought in the past and may think in the future you can't go back and look at what you may think in the future but you know what I mean you will retain the knowledge that this is a tool that exists at your bequest for your use and cannot do your thinking for you but almost everyone using tools at some point forgets that the tools are only as good as the inputs and the people using the tools all right which points to in the world of phylogeny which was the diagram inspiration for writing things out this way we have two different kinds of tools we have analytical tools where you feed in a data set and it tells you what the most parsimonious way to arrange the species on the tree is based on the data you have given it it's an analytical tool and then we have graphical tools in which you can put any two species next to each other and you can propose that this is actually how I think these things evolved rather than that way and so what you're pointing to which I 100% agree with is that this tool is a tool for you to make your own thinking more complete and for to force you to put explicit probabilities on things nothing says that your intuition is any good right nothing here it is a visualization tool an important distinction though and I think this is part of why and I this is inside baseball here but I think part of the reason why I object to comparing this to like a phylogeny visualization program like mclade used to use is that when you are drawing a possible set of relationships between species a so-called phylogeny tree you will never presume or claim that you have included everything there is no complete tree of life it just never has existed it's too much right and so you you always know that you are excluding some things and you are therefore making no claims about those relationships they just aren't on there if you say look on this tree of life cats and dogs are more closely related to each other than either are to mice you're like what what about hyenas like what about hyenas if I add hyenas and cats on hyenas are more closely related to each other than dogs I didn't make it clear about hyenas therefore their absence from the hypothesis of relationship that is the tree is is uh is not information right whereas on the sort of path analysis tool that you have created you are attempting and I think in most cases that you have shared today have succeeded in describing the complete solution set the the scope of possibilities and it is actually necessary for the meaning to be made because if you simply exclude something from what is possible and then you put you know then your probabilities add up to one there's a there's a lie there somewhere there's there's there's a falsehood right there's a where there's at least an assumption that's unstated and I agree with you and I must say I've lost my diagram because the capability of the program has not preserved the state in the tab but anyway I will fix that down the road here I will I will just say that I cautioned you said you just created this two days ago it's too early to share this it is too early to share it but but anyway I think the discussion so far has been good there's a couple of things I wanted to highlight though one of which we've already hinted at that the danger of being socially pressured into falsely closing off a possibility the difference between setting a possibility at one in a thousand or one in ten thousand versus closing it off and forgetting it ever existed is profound and it is also you know as you and I talked about earlier today the in normal life you have to just close off possibilities it's part of being functional and so we have the circuit in us which is like yeah I already decided you know at the point that you've picked the thing you're going to eat off the menu keeping alive all of the things that you might have ordered the waitress shows up hey we got a new special like I don't care I don't care I don't care what's more I'd rather not remember the thing I decided not to order because I don't want to be disappointed in the thing I got so you know so anyway the point is normal this is what brand loyalty is about too it's not like that's the best it's like the decision is made right the decision is made or the decision is made I'm going to Costco we'll see which two things they have and choose between them but I'm not you know I'm not going to Amazon right where everything is available so anyway the tendency for normal people in order to function to close off possibilities and walk away from them and try not to think about them again is powerful and completely understandable in fact you probably are more functional in normal life if you're good at just pruning things from the tree and walking away but in terms of being logical in the midst of the Cartesian crisis when things are contentious when there is vast pressure to well you know you admit that the vaccines are safe sorry I can't admit that because I know too much right the point is you've got a world of possibilities that are ugly that are frightening that are uh sometimes falsely introduced you know can somebody pollute your tree by flooding the zone with garbage possibilities sure so trying to figure out how to do this in an elegant enough way that you can remember what you thought why you thought it and why you now think something different is a truly important skill so false falsely closing falsely setting something that has a low probability to zero in order to simplify your thinking life is a bad habit and yeah and so I would say um we talked about future iterations of this this app you're building um say you have something for which there are you know five possible outcomes and three of them you've decided really the possibilities are vanishingly small you don't reduce them to zero and get rid of them entirely and thus lose track of them ever having been possibilities because it's rare that you actually know for sure that's a zero zeros and ones are very hard to come by in probability space zero you know point you ten to the negative six as you put in one of those yeah but that's different from zero yeah it's different from zero and so you know I would love to see a beautiful sort of visually useful version of this in which the probability scales is on a gray scale so something that's very unlikely is closer to white on white and the closer to one it is the is black on white uh and it's just much more visible so that from you know from any kind of a distance you can see okay what at this moment in time the probabilities I'm assigning to this what do I think is most true okay I can see it but what is also still possible even though I don't think it's true right now you can still see the things but they're not what draw your eye and that is in fact how our brains work when they're working best I can still see the whole possibility space but this is where I think it's gonna be this this is the line that I think the truth is gonna be on so I'm gonna go there even though these are still out there I know they are but I don't need to focus there right now because I know they'll be there if I ever need to come back yep um I would also argue that if you had two groups of people you had one group of people that was committed to doing that maintaining an awareness of what they once thought possible and one group that prunes the tree down to what they now think is likely what you're describing actually happened in biology classes as people became committed to their interpretation rather than uh remaining um opened to the full solution set even if they now believe this thing is likely of what topic we're talking about uh we're describing with the 20 questions exercise where people become very committed to one interpretation um it doesn't matter it's not it's not central but the point is I would like to have discussions only with people who implicitly or explicitly enter with the awareness that they are perfectly certain of nothing right right and I think you can just say that am I perfectly certain that I exist no I'd put it at one in a hundred thousand one in a million maybe less that I don't exist and I'm not just perceiving the universe in the way I think I am but you can't rule out the possibility that some kind of insanity would feel like this but that also doesn't mean that maintaining that as an extremely low probability possibility warrants any of your attention well no no I would like it can be in like I think a utility of this this sort of app that you're building um is that you can have it on the visual and be like yep great uh I don't need to I just don't need to worry about it okay but then the point is I'm a big fan of rules at the door rules at the door for an analytical discussion is perfect certainty is never warranted perfect certainty is never warranted right you can act based on the fact that this is the right way this is the best bet but if you have perfect certainty in your mind of anything including your own identity you you've started off on the wrong foot so anyway yeah it doesn't belong in every diagram in fact it belongs on no diagrams it belongs as an assumption of the fact that you're sitting down to diagram probabilities okay all right the other thing I wanted to add was in thinking about these sorts of issues I believe in our in our discussion this morning that we actually happened on to something useful in another contentious quadrant there's a very live debate about what the essence of woke is there's obviously a major accusation about the woke right and claims about what it means that they are woke and things like that and I think uh in talking about the pressure to close off possibilities prematurely or close them off without a proper evidentiary basis that they are truly impossible that the reality of what the essence of woke is became clear something I had thought loosely had became very concrete and the idea is in a social environment let's say it's medicine or the academy there is a set of beliefs let's say it's medicine and the beliefs are vaccines are very safe and then evidence causes a subset of the people in that milieu to doubt something happens enough doctors see a patient regress and they say yeah that's not related to the vaccine but then it happens again enough people begin to get the sense that something is not right the pressure to get those people to either reverse course and reverse what they now know or to be perfectly silent about what they know in order to maintain the consensus is extremely powerful and so what I'm going to claim what I've said what I said to James Lindsay and my uh my intervention with him was that the essence of woke is cancellation and that I don't I don't think that term applies to anybody who's not trying to shut down the voice of others but I think it's two pieces there's banish we're not going to platform you because you've lost your mind and there's coercion we're going to get you back on board with the consensus and those two things are basically a choice either you get back on board with the consensus or you're out I would argue that those two things are the essential core of wokeness and that it is the artificial closing off of live possibilities that is the uniting feature right we're either going to frighten you into saying say the words vaccines are safe right or if you don't say that I'm sorry he used to be a pretty good doctor until he became an anti-vaxxer right something like that so it is it is that thing close down that possibility or else and the or else involves ejecting you we're not going to platform you you're not going to talk to you maybe we'll come after you in the courts we'll accuse you of fraud whatever we're going to do so it is that social phenomenon which is totally non-analytic we saw it over and over and over again explicitly at evergreen in the meltdown almost nine years ago you saw a couple of very explicit personal examples in which young people whom you did not know tried to speak to you you were interested in talking to anyone who would talk as opposed to yell on scream and just shout epithets and accusations and several as I remember of the young people who wanted to speak to you came away from those conversations thinking well wait a minute that's not what I was told that was going to be he treated me with respect and that's the end of your racist there's no bigotry and that's odd and then you saw them reeducated when they refused to when they refused to continue to shout the the maxims of the of the revolution that was happening in front of us so I think I think your your encapsulation of what woke is is born of a very particular set of extreme circumstances that really did encapsulate what it is that they do what it is the main weaponry of the of the woke it's it's uh you know re recollect or exercise yeah we're going to intimidate you into rejoining the fold and saying the things or we're going to exile you yeah now what I'm saying here is that woke is two things one woke is an ideology which is only applicable in that the one case of the woke revolution and its various beliefs about race and about trans and about right those things and then there's woke the toolkit yeah and the toolkit is wielded by others we certainly saw it work during covid and in fact at the time I called uh some people medically woke because their idea was those beliefs of yours are intolerable and nobody should be talking to you right that's woke that's the toolkit woke and well and there's a reason that um you know it's it's it's Maoist china yep it's you know it's it's communism wherever it has shown up uh when we are aware of what the strategies are it looks like this more or less over and over and over again yep because the toolkit is a product of game theory this is a way to it's a way to wield power that is not derived from the fact that you are correct it is derived from the fact that you are in a position to coerce and to exile yeah yeah I guess then there may just be a disagreement um I don't really care so not between you and me but about what people mean when they say woke so that may be the heart of some of the disagreements that you are having with people that um because woke the strategy exists outside of the new moment of woke the ideology and has existed wherever communism has existed the set of strategies is going to be called you know communist or Maoist or something and then it's the ideology that gets the name that that may be the uh the heart of some of the disagreement that you have with some people well the disagreement I think stems from the following thing the alternative claim you've got my claim about the woke toolkit involving coercion and cancellation threats coercion and cancellation in order to keep you within a set of belief parameters the alternative perspective which James Lindsay has articulated as well as anyone has is that the key aspect of woke is effectively the belief that there is an epiphany and that those who have had it can see now I don't disagree that that does tend to show up but if you think about what the idea is like the problem is there are a lot of garbage epiphanies yeah but everything good starts as one so the idea that there might be some epiphany that you have about you know whether vaccines are safe enough to be used on children yeah right the point is ah you're woke you claim to have woken up to something and it's like you want to demonize the idea of waking up to something because we wake up to lots of stuff and there's lots of stuff that I've woken up to that I would not go back to to that I would not go back to sleep over and it's because it's right and I am safer and healthier and happier to know about it so right so the point is which is the more essential feature of the woke toolkit is it epiphany and does that distinguish it from anything else right or is it the toolkit used to prevent people from straying from an enforced consensus and I would claim it's obviously the latter thing yep struggle sessions yeah struggle sessions not to put too fine a point on it um gosh I feel like there was more places here but maybe maybe that's that's it yeah for now um and maybe what time is it what time does it think it is it depends what it is depends with the definition of it yeah I think we're gonna hold off on sharks honestly because I kind of just don't want to um introduce actual phylogenies on a day when there were sort of tree diagrams being shown totally this will also give sharks a little more time to evolve oh man they've been so slow so slow no actually one of the so I mentioned the shark thing last week I'll just keep on like dragging it on then probably we'll never get to it but apparently they had um very rapid evolution and diversification but it was so long ago that it feels like they've just been you know changing a little bit for a very long time and they kind of just looked like they did all they're changing all at once and then they've they're just like we did it got there they've been resting on their cartilaginous laurels for a good many long before million years oh yeah angiosperms man they are late comers late bloomers wow yeah that was a really good pun that there are a few people are gonna get yeah um okay but we did you insisted actually yep um I do that sometimes and usually I ignore you it doesn't mean I didn't insist that's not true that's true um there are two so we live in this county uh in the state of Washington San Juan county which has four fairy served islands and another several few handfuls of inhabited islands and it's kind of even looking up I don't know how many people live down the in the county I don't know several tens of thousands ish something um and uh there are two weekly newspapers one that comes out of San Juan one that comes out of orcas every week and every week they both report basically the um the sheriff's log um police blotter yeah the police blotter they call the sheriff's log here um and I usually I read it every week because it's wait it's it's yeah it's quite it just reminded like literally there's no street light on the island that we live on and um and we're in the county seat right so I don't think there's a street light in the county yeah I think there must not be yeah because if there's none here there's yeah none anywhere um but you know still that you know there's some there's some real things and so this is from um March 18th this is this is last week's um this is the most recent one there'll be a new one coming out today um but you know we have things like a Lopez island deputy stopped a vehicle near the intersection on mud bay road and vista road the driver was subsequently issued an infraction for speeding 50 miles per hour and a post at 35 mile per hour zone additional warnings were issued and you know I'll say like this is the entire log for the week for the entire county like it's just there's not much going on here uh and you know a Lopez resident reported fraud that resulted in a significant loss of funds both in cash and gift cards purchased at local business uh more traffic stops uh there's occasional you know drunk driving um occasional domestic incidents um but it's uh you know it's it's pretty rare there's anything all that serious however I feel like uh the sheriff's log in our county outdid itself uh this week with the following again from the sheriff's log from March 18th 2025 the following entry a deputy received a report of found property a one dollar bill was located in the sheriff's office and the owner was unknown the money was booked into evidence as found property not many counties where somebody would book a dollar into evidence booked into evidence yeah it was a slow day even here yep yeah all right it's an amazing story yeah yeah so you insisted I know I know it's good I read that to you and you're like you have to you gotta share it yeah um so from the county where occasional dollar bills are booked into evidence uh it's a you know it's it's a beautiful place to live it's um it's a little insane for those of you who have been paying attention to Washington state um it's it's even further losing its grip on reality in some ways at least the lawmakers are but it is a beautiful beautiful state and the county is quite enough to occasionally book one dollar bills into evidence of lost property and I got a piece so let's uh wow I didn't think we were done okay no we can we can we can do that um so we'll be back on uh Sunday with a Q&A on on locals at 11 a.m pacific and next week with our next live stream and until you see us next be good to the ones you love eat good food and get outside be well everyone well